*NSYNC: GET TO THE SHOW (GAME BOY COLOR)

Alert the coastguard and throw me some water wings, because I'm in way out of my depth with this one. I've drifted into the murky waters of heartthrobs, hysterical screaming and relentless commercialism with Infogrames and Stunt Puppy's 2001 Game Boy Color abomination *NSYNC: Get to the Show.

Yes, that *NSYNC - the boyband that weren't as famous as The Backstreet Boys, the one that included Justin Timberlake, the pop behemoths who have a curious connection to gaming in that one of them some how ended up being Sephiroth. Someone in *NSYNC's no-doubt vast management team decided there were mountains of cash just waiting to be drained from the "idiots with Game Boy Colors" market, and so here we are.
In my youth, I railed against the scourge of the manufactured pop-band and how they were destroying real music, man: but then, so does every fourteen-year-old weirdo who listens to the Dead Kennedys and refuses to get his hair cut. Once you get older you realise that pop bands have very little to do with music and everything to do with the kind of rapacious acquisition of money that makes Scrooge McDuck look like a free-spending libertine, and if these new-fangled videogames are a way to further line some pockets then by god you're going to seeing them in stores near you real soon. Hence *NSYNC: Get to the Show. On a note that's not directly related to the game itself but which will no doubt end up colouring my judgement somewhat, just typing the hideously vapid linguistic construct that is "*NSYNC" makes me really, really angry. A terrible pun, devised by the worst people. Shameful.
Oh yeah, there's a game.

You are cast in the role of *NSYNC's (ugh) biggest fan, and the boys are about to bring you into their colourful world of fame, fortune and soul-destroyingly tedious minigames. First, you've got to enter your name and chose which of the boys will be your personal guide on this wild adventure. My name is Barry, because I'm sure as hell not going to use my real name in case this ends up being used as evidence when our alien overlords descend from space and put us on trial to judge whether we are worthy of continued existence. Obviously I chose Justin as my mentor, because he is the dreamiest and also the only one I've ever heard of. Actually that's not true, I've heard of Lance Bass due to his aforementioned Kingdom Hearts role, but Timberlake is the only one I'd recognise in the street.

What did I tell you? He's dreamy as fuck. I'd scream at him during a concert, but then again I do that to every performer I see. That's why I'm banned from every music venue in South Yorkshire.
So, now "Barry" is firmly embedded in the *NSYNC bosom and he's been given some duties to fulfill, what genre of game are we looking at here? Maybe a band management sim, like Popstar Maker and occupying roughly the same circle of Hell? A rhythm-action game where you dance along with the band? A first-person shooter?

Fuck no, this is a roadie-em-up. Your mission is to ferry *NSYNC around and perform a few tasks to keep them happy, because a happy boyband is a financially viable boyband. Sadly, you don't get to do any of the usual roadie business like scoring hookers and drugs or beating up nosy paparazzi but hey - you get to drive a limo!

Your first job is a top-down driving game where you have to get the boys from Point A to Point Wherever the Hell. Immediately the game throws you into some gameplay so boring, so grindingly dull, so completely lacking in the excitement and challenge and sense of accomplishment that a good videogame can bring that you'll wonder if it wasn't developed as a neurological test to see how long human beings can cope with sensory deprivation before they chew their own arms off.
I said it was a driving game and I suppose that's true in the sense that there's a car and it moves, but this minigame features an almost total absence of interactivity. The A button moves the car forward, and you press left or right to change lanes or take exits onto different, almost identical roads. You're not even really controlling the vehicle itself, you're just moving it from lane to lane and avoiding the one car that sometimes appears ahead of you. I say avoiding, the first time I saw another road user I drove into them as fast as possible, (i.e. not very,) hoping for a fiery explosion and a Game Over screen depicting *NSYNC's bloodied remains strewn across the highway. That didn't happen, I just bounced off. "Disappointed" doesn't really cover it.

The only thing complicating your sedate drive is that *NSYNC are a demanding bunch of so-and-sos, and they frequently request that you stop so they can perform an errand. One of them "gotta mail a card", so you stop at the post office. One of them wants donuts, (probably the porky one: there's one in every boyband,) and so, as pictured above, you stop at the DONUTS shop. Strangely, one of the most common requests is that on their way towards their next engagement *NSYNC absolutely, positively and without argument must stop to get a bunch of flowers, or sometimes several bunches. I can only assume that "flowers" is slang for class A narcotics.

Eventually you reach your destination and your chosen "boy" announces that they're plum tuckered out and need some sleep. No sleep for Barry, though, because it's his job to stay up all night and make sure the boys aren't disturbed.

To make sure *NSYNC get the rest they need, you're forced to participate in cursor-based shooting gallery event. You move your star-shaped cursor over each of the items that appear in the windows and press a button to get rid of them. It's just like the shooting sections in Snatcher and I'm sorry, I can't go any further in comparing this to Snatcher. That way madness lies.
However, things are not as simple as they appear. You see, there are two separate buttons for getting rid of things. You press A to shut up noisy items like TVs, cats and women - and please don't mistake that for misogyny on my part, because the only time you see any women in this game is when you're telling them to be quiet - but you have to press B to "put *NSYNC back to sleep" when they appear. That's fine on a technical level, but there's a problem: I don't have the slightest clue what the members of *NSYNC look like, and you're penalised for pressing the wrong button on the wrong item. I mean, sure, a ringing telephone is unlikely to be a member of *NSYNC. Old woman with her hair in rollers? Probably not gonna be exciting too many pre-teen girls. But what about this guy?

Maybe *NSYNC had a rockabilly phase that passed me by. Hey, it could happen! For all I know, this could be one of the founding members of the band and not just some Fifties throwback causing trouble in a hotel window. He's not being particularly noisy, I noticed. So, I tried to put him back to bed with the rest of *NSYNC and as it turns out no, this guy is not in the band. Lose one point, Barry.
This guy, on the other hand:

This eyebrow-waggling weirdo is not, as I first suspected, a sex offender who gets his jollies by peering into the windows of sleeping men - he is actually a bona-fide member of *NSYNC. I think the rest of the boys should be keeping an eye on this one.
And that's all there is to minigame number two. Move your cursor to the correct location, press the corresponding button, make sure you reach the quota of items so that you can progress up the roadie ladder. Easy as pie, dull as a wallpaper-paste sandwich. I've performed my task admirably, and that task was making sure no women got anywhere near *NSYNC's bedrooms. I'll leave you to interpret that one.

Oh good, everyone's back in the limo. It's identical to the first stage, except now there are cacti. Oh how I envy those cacti. No eyes, no hands, no compulsion to play games like *NSYNC: Get to the Show.
This trip through the desert has made *NSYNC hungry, and it's down to you to fix 'em up some delicious burgers.

Ahh, this is more like the real personal assistant experience: your scrawny, malnourished body buckling under both the pressure and the weight of a giant tray while your employers pelt you with food. Still *NSYNC's biggest fan, Barry? I bet you wish they'd left you where they found you: trying to evade the police by hiding in the toilet of a roadside florist.
In what turns out to be an even shallower version of Yoshi's Egg, this minigame has you shuffling left and right to catch burger ingredients as they fall from the sky, all in order to meet the dietary demands of your five well-choreographed overlords. Catch the right ingredients as indicated on the bottom-left of the screen and the boys will be happy, even going so far as to compliment you on your "tight work".

Yep, that's definitely one tight-looking burger. Barry's face wears a rictus grin, but his true feelings of impotent despair are captured in the way he's repeatedly punching himself in the dick.
Of course, if you collect just one wrong ingredient then *NSYNC boys show their true prima donna natures, forcing you to build them an entirely new burger at the smallest splash of the wrong condiment. These boys didn't spend years practising their puppy-dog eyes and gelling their hair just to have to pick the gherkins off their own food, that's what schlubs like Barry are for.
Once you've crafted their burgers to their exact specifications, *NSYNC allow you a brief respite with another limousine trip.

The pine trees would indicate that we're moving into a more temperate climate, which makes sense. Each summer, all the boybands migrate north to partake of the natural bounty of the woodlands, preparing for the long winter by eating their fill and challenging lesser pop groups such as 5ive for dominance over the pack.
It's exactly the same as the other two limo stages, of course. What next?

I switched from Justin to Lance, by the way. I can't help it; they're all so dreamy that I can't stay loyal to just one. Anyway, we've arrived at the concert venue, but before the boys can go on stage they have a "special luck thing" that they do. A ritual, a team-bonding exercise that knits the boys together and brings them alive with the spirit of music and you, Barry: you're one of the chosen few from outside the popstar dimension who gets to take part in this ancient and sacred ritual. So, what does this "special luck thing" entail?

You heard the man, Barry. Now drop your trousers.

Never mind, pull 'em back up. This is actually a friendly game of hackeysack, which for any non-Americans out there is (as far as I can tell) like keepie-uppies but with a beanbag instead of a football. This minigame is a digital recreation of the "sport" and it is one of the very worst videogame experiences I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. To pass, you kick the ball to each of your band-mates and don't let the sack touch the floor for 30 seconds. The ball comes near you, you press a button to kick it to someone else, and that's it. It's Pong but without the complication of having to move the paddle, and somehow with worse graphics. It's mind-erasingly simplistic, insultingly so, and for someone to have created this and to have had it released as part of an honest-to-God videogame cartridge boggles the mind. It wouldn't pass muster as a minigame from an Atari 2600 title, and what's worse you have to go though it five bloody times before the game decides you have suffered enough and sets you free.

Funny, I don't feel awesome. I mostly just feel really sad.
Your reward for helping *NSYNC with their day-to-day bullshit is the chance to watch them perform live on your Game Boy. Oh, what fun!

Yup, that's *NSYNC alright. I'd recognise that collection of multi-coloured trousers anywhere. Not only do you get to see the show, but you can interact with it, too! Well, kind of. You can cycle through four or five music tracks, change the colour of the background and best of all you can chose what dance routines the guys will perform. Do you want to see them in action? Tough, here they are.

Good lord. Well, at least I got a good laugh out of the background "dancing". They look like a group of pensioners who are contemplating whether to break into a Cossack dance or not.
The concert scrolls on for two minutes before the game ends. That's it, go home, *NSYNC have got a lot of bouquets to deliver and they mustn't be bothered. Still, your chosen band member gives you a special shout-out so I guess that makes everything worthwhile.

In summary, to call *NSYNC: Get to the Show a videogame is a slap in the face to anyone who has ever worked hard to make a game that excites or entertains. This thing is a wafer-thing piece of garbage designed solely to fleece money from gullible pop fans, and as such it draws comparisons to Hooters Road Trip. In fact, I think *NSYNC: Get to the Show is worse than Hooters, or at the very least more morally reprehensible. Both titles consist of a worthless "gaming" experience dripping with a thick coat of marketing bullshit designed to lure in casual buyers - tits in the case of Hooters, tits who can dance for Get to the Show - but where at least Hooters was sort-of targeted at people who might be old enough to know better, *NSYNC was aimed at kids, the poor little buggers. I know I'm well outside the target demographic on this one, but that doesn't stop it being a deeply awful game that even the youngest of children, and most hardcore of *NSYNC fans, will be bored of almost instantly.
So, congratulations to Infogrames and Stunt Puppy - it looks like they've set a new record for the worst game I've ever played. Lucky for them that I play so many bad games, because one day even this piece of crap is likely to be out-awfuled. Lookin' forward to that one, folks.

Thanks to Vectropia on Tumblr for posting the box art for the dreck and unknowingly setting into motion a chain of events that can never be undone. He's got a good Tumblr, you should check it out.

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GINGA NINKYOUDEN (ARCADE)

I seem to have become a little obsessed with the games of Japanese developer Jaleco in recent weeks, probably because all their games seem to fall into that "interesting but flawed" bracket that fascinates me so. The Astyanax was bland to play but lovely to look at, 64th Street was a solid if unimaginative brawler enlivened by a bizarre in-game universe, Best Bout Boxing was a pretty good boxing game that never reached the heights of the Punch-Out series... and then there's today's game: Jaleco's 1987 arcade title Ginga Ninkyouden.

I'm sure many VGJunk readers will be familiar with kusoge, but if you aren't then kusoge is a Japanese term that means "shit game". It's also a phrase that means different things to different people, but it doesn't necessarily mean that any really bad game is kusoge. While some kusoge are completely irredeemable slabs of digital garbage, like the baffling Famicom RPG Super Monkey Daibouken, games can also fall into this mysterious category for other reasons. They might have neat ideas that are woefully implemented. They might have appalling graphics and sound. Some games are considered kusoge due to their sadistic difficulty level, a trait seen at near-legendary levels in Spelunker. Then there are games that actively set out to claim a place in the kusoge vaults, like the infamous Takeshi no Chousenjou, by being as willfully unfair, obtuse and downright stupid as possible - for example, in that game you can only progress by singing karaoke into the Famicom controller's built-in microphone for a full hour.

Hopefully that'll give you some idea of what constitutes kusoge, and you can (and should) check out Hardcore Gaming 101's weekly kusoge feature for more.
I'm telling you all this because I'm going to forego my usual "play through the game and discuss the results at the end" approach and tell you now that Ginga Ninkyouden is kusoge. You'll see why as I play through it, but this is a title that definitely fits the bill of a "shitty game". And yet, it just about held my interest until the end, despite the painful gameplay and general lack of redeeming qualities.

The plot is straightforward, at least - your girlfriend is kidnapped by an alien overlord wearing a Hallowe'en vampire costume and a robot tiger mask. Pretty fearsome, especially when you add in the floating tea-tray that carries him about. Our hero doesn't see any of this but still knows who's responsible, so I'm presuming that these two either have history a la Mario and Bowser, or the villain left him a note like when you have a parcel delivered but you're not in to sign for it.

Time to rescue your lost love in the only way our hero (or any arcade hero, really) knows how: by travelling through a series out side-scrolling, platform-filled environments, punching anything and everything that he happens across.

I was a little worried that the first enemy I fought was Godzilla, but our hero must have something about him because he can defeat the King of the Monsters with a single punch. I think 'Zilla's holding back, though, there's no atomic breath or anything, plus he's tiny. Maybe it's actually a horde of Godzukis that I'm sending to whatever the kaiju equivalent of the afterlife is, and that's such a nice thought that I think I'll hold on to it.

A little further on, and hey that guy with the machine gun sure does look like Rambo. Huh, two characters I recognise already and I'm only a few screens in. Well, I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Oh yeah, the gameplay. Well, somehow Jaleco managed to take an incredibly simple gameplay style and fuck it up royally. Ginga Ninkyouden is your standard arcade action-adventure, like Adventure Island but minus most of the fun. Your only moves are jumping and attacking or a combination of the two, but the main character goes about these actions with a kind of stiff-legged clumsiness that reminds me of myself after about eight pints. Our hero is lumbered with Castlevania-style jumping with no mid-air control but yet none of the precision of Konami's classic, and if you touch a ceiling while jumping you bang your head and fall straight downwards.
You're also screwed over by the art direction, because Ginga Ninkyouden's characters are in that super-deformed style that means big heads, hubcap-sized eyes and stubby little limbs. As your primary attack is a punch and your arms have a range that can only be measured by high-power electron microscopes, to hit the enemies you have to get so intimate with them that I'm surprised a porn company hasn't shown up to film your battles, and it's nigh-impossible to defeat more than one bad guy with them running into you and doing you some damage.

Just time for a quick break to leer at a young woman taking a bath. It even plays a speech sample of his perverted laugh. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Here's the first boss. It's an old man who obviously went to the same costume shop as the main villain, which is going to cause some embarrassment at the EvilCo. company Hallowe'en party. He attacks by... well, I'm not sure, actually. Some white strip flies out and hits you, you get hurt, he laughs. I think he's whipping me with a towel. Once you've beaten him - and that's no easy task, given the pathetic range of your attacks - you're free to jump on your turtle and fly into space.

What's that? Everyone knows turtles can't fly and certainly can't survive in the harsh vacuum of space? Well shit, you're right. Better transform him into a robot, then.

The turtle becomes a robot and Ginga Ninkyouden becomes a (really bad) side-scrolling shooter. As far as I can tell Ginga Ninkyouden translates to something like "Legend of Galactic Heroism", so I guess this is where that comes from. It's a short stage and I'm sure you can see how it works - like Gradius, if Gradius was designed by someone whose only prior experience with computers was operating a pocket calculator. Everything's too big and too fast so you're constantly taking damage, and the stage it just one barren starfield filled with UFOs. I'm fed up with it already, but at least it's very short.

Your arms look plenty long enough there, champ.

Back on solid ground for the next stage, where you are instantly beset by an army of jiang shi. If Godzilla and Rambo aren't cutting it for you, you might as well try Chinese zombies, I guess. The theme of this stage appears to be a festival, complete with lots of food stalls.

Footstalls manned by Kamen Rider and Captain Okita from Space Battleship Yamato. Poor Rider, fighting evil pays so badly that he's had to branch out into the yakisoba business. If they don't tickle your tastebuds, maybe you'd prefer something prepared by Gamera or one of H. R. Giger's Aliens?

I think I'll pass on the xenomorph chow, cheers. I've eaten enough food from enough funfairs to know that it'll make your chest feel like it's about to explode without any additional space-monster fetuses.
You've probably figured out the reason that Ginga Ninkyouden fascinates me by now, and that's because it's got more cameos than a Victorian jewellers that specialises in the mass production of brooches. Pretty much every major anime franchise from the 70s/80s puts in an appearance, sometimes slightly disguised but usually not, like when Joe Yabuki from the boxing manga Ashita no Joe turns up and hits you with his famous cross-counter.

This is Ginga Ninkyouden's only real value - as a sort of I-Spy book for people like me who spent too much time watching this stuff.

Oh hey, another boss. This time it's a girl in a pink leopard-print dress who appears to be beating me up with a hammer. I'm sure she's from something else, although I don't recognise her. Notice that the villain is hovering nearby - he's gotten cocky, and after seeing how bad I am at this game it's hardly surprising. Time to defeat this poor, vulnerable, extremely powerful young girl and head to the next stage.

This time it's a building site, and right off the bat I'm confronted with probably my favourite enemy in the game. If you're like me and you used to be (or still are) obsessed with aliens, UFOs, The X Files and all things otherworldly then you might recognise these guys as the Flatwoods Monster. The Flatwoods Monster was a "real" extraterrestrial that was witnessed by several people in West Virginia in 1952, although it seems highly likely that what actually happened was an owl scared the crap out of them and they ran away. No judgement from me, owls can be pretty creepy. Anyway, Flatty here became one of the more famous alien sightings and he seems to be particularly popular in Japan, where he pops up in quite a few videogames.

Also found in space but definitely not real (yet...) are these Zakus, the cannon-fodder mechs from the Gundam universe. The one at the bottom is hitting me in the face with an axe. How rude.

Continuing the giant robot theme, the boss of this stage is, erm, Giant Robo. Giant Robo is a franchise created in the Sixties, and I'm sure you can figure out what it's about even if you're not sure why said robot is wearing a Pharaoh's headdress. I'm sure there's an explanation given in the manga that makes perfect sense and isn't daft at all. Speaking of daft, the live-action Giant Robo series was broadcast in the US under the wonderfully stupid title of Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. Whoever came up with that title deserves a medal.

Another shooter stage follows. Correction, another really dull shooter stage, with the only difference from the last one being that the UFOs are replaced by flying hands. The boss is a Dr. Wily type riding the ubiquitous hover-disc, and in a game rammed full of appearance by characters from other franchises this guy stands out because his weapon literally fires cameo appearances at you. Instead of bullets, it launches tiny versions of famous Japanese robots. Here, take a look.

On the left we've got Mazinger, Astroboy and Getter Robo, and the ones on the right I don't recognise. Actually, the second one down on the right might be the Guncannon from Gundam. If you know what they are, let me know in the comments so that I don’t end up spending hours going though every super robot show I can think of in order to satisfy my pointless curiosity. (EDIT: mystery solved in the comments, thanks Reynaldo!)
Unfortunately for the boss, tiny robots aren't as good ammunition as, say, rockets, and soon you'll have either beaten him or become bored of this game and turned it off already.

Some kind of moon base is the setting for this stage, and there's really nothing much to report other than to mention that the enemy pictured above is a robot high school delinquent with a pompadour and a cyber-visor. It breaks my cold, black heart that I'm stuck playing as Mr. Flipper-Arms. I want to be a robo-punk. Is that so much to ask? Just one videogame where I can live out my dreams of squatting outside convenience stores, fighting the bosses of rival high school gangs and planning the destruction of the inferior flesh-beings who have enslaved my mechanical brethren, that's all I'm asking. I should probably email that description to Suda 51.

The boss is inspired by Sukeban Deka, a series about a delinquent schoolgirl who fights crime using a yo-yo. That is, she uses a yo-yo to fight crime. There's no criminal gang whose M.O. is to only perpetrate yo-yo related heists, like some Batman villain who was horribly scarred by an Around-The-World trick gone terribly wrong. Her yo-yo attacks are extremely effective - I can attest to the fact that getting clonked by a yo-yo really hurts, and she also has a huge range with that thing. Our hero can actually increase his attack power: killing a few enemies gives him a tiny knife, and after a few more kills it becomes a sword. This is great and all, but the moment an enemy touches you you lose your power-up and there are so many enemies swarming the screen that I don't think I ever had the sword for more than five or six seconds. I wish I had a yo-yo instead.

Oh good, the final stage. Just in time, too, because there's only so much that seeing a character I recognise from a different, better piece of entertainment can do to keep me interested in wading through these endless hordes of enemies.
Still, this stage does include some of more interesting (to me, at least) cameos. In the screenshot above you can see a couple of Jigens from Lupin the 3rd pottering about and looking pretty uninterested in the whole affair, and above them is Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star. I think Ken's supposed to be a mid-boss; he takes a few hits to defeat and there's only one of him in the whole game, but he's less of a challenge than every other bit of the stage so calling him a "boss" seems a bit much. On the plus side, when you kill him he inflates a few times before exploding in traditional Fist of the North Star fashion.

Kenshiro and the Flatwoods Monster in the same game, I never thought I'd see the like. Shame it had to be in a game as ropey as Ginga Ninkyouden, really. And look, I've caught up to the head villain!

This time he's not just hovering nearby to keep an eye on how his elite troops - you know, yo-yo-wielding schoolgirl, old man with a towel, those guys - are doing. This is a real fight, as long as your definition of "a real fight" includes standing right in front of him, jumping straight up and hitting him in the face a few times. Easy as you like, but to my disappointment and presumably the disappointment of anyone who ever made it this far (there can't be many) the bad guy has another form. A space-faring form, and you know what that means!

Ginga Ninkyouden really goes out on a high with another ponderous shoot-em-up segment, this time a single battle against the boss in his stone space dragon form. Just die already, you great grey sack of crap! Why do you even want this girl so badly, anyway? Actually, probably best not to know. He probably wants to make her... cosplay. Shudder. Maybe that's been his plan all along, he's just rounding up people for use in his giant cosplay-themed amusement park. That's why all the enemies are from other franchises, they're all the people he's already kidnapped, brainwash and dressed up. It's a good job I'm here to put an end to his evil designs, really.

A few shots from my robot turtle later and Ginga Ninkyouden is over, presumably with the hero and his rescued girlfriend heading back to Earth or wherever the hell they're from. I don't know because they don't bother showing that, just a picture of a sword (that I never used) sticking out of a brown asteroid (that I never visited). Good riddance to 'em, I say.
So, this is kusoge. A shitty game, but shitty in a way that doesn't feel like the hollow corporate nothingness of something like a Transformers: Dark of the Moon tie-in. The people making this obviously had fun doing it, sprinkling in appearances from their favourite characters and trying to make the whole thing feel like an anime series in game form. Unfortunately, they forgot to include any fun while they were at it.

The big thing that ruins the game for me is the difficulty level. Make no mistake, this is a damn tough videogame. Enemies constantly stream in from all angles, often taking more than one hit to defeat and quickly swamping you with sheer numbers. Even if you try to fight them cautiously, chances are you're going to get hurt due to the pitiful, infuriating, hair-tearingly small range of your attacks. It's not just the enemies either - one fun example is the turtle that carries you away after each boss. You have to jump onto the turtle, and that's fine. The turtle moves back and forth. Okay, a bit irritating straight after a boss battle, but whatever. However, the turtle does not move on a set path. He slides left and right at random, guided by whatever whims float through his thick turtle head, and it seems like every time you try to make the jump he moves juuust out of the way enough for you to fall to your (instant, of course) death. Factor in the awkward jumping controls and you've got yourself a recipe for fun not matched since that time I combined nitric acid and the contents of my boxers.
The only thing that got me through Ginga Ninkyouden was that fact that there's a dipswitch setting you can change to make yourself invincible. Even Jaleco realised that this was an over-difficult, frustrating, tedious mess of a game to play and so they built in a god mode. It's a good job too, because there's no way I would have stuck it out if I'd been dying every five seconds.

Not even the presentation can save it. The graphics are primitive even by 1987's standard, especially when you compare them to The Astyanax which was released only two years later. They're not terrible, I suppose, but they are a bit tiring on the eyes. The sound is okay - some of the music is decent but most of it is just "there", chirping away in the background. There are quite a lot of speech sample, which is pretty impressive. Overall, though, I'm sticking with my earlier claim that Ginga Ninkyouden is only enjoyable as a kind of digital Japanese pop-culture safari: just turn on god mode, play through it once to catch as many cameos as you can and never go near it again.
Then again, it does feature both Kenshiro and the Flatwoods Monster. Okay, ten out of ten!

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